Kansas Wheat CEO Justin Gilpin: Overcoming the Southern Plains Drought

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If you want to make it rain, you should just pull the combine out of the shed. That’s the joke. The absence of rain…until it arrived much too late…has not been funny to farmers in the Southern Plains.

Blame the combine, perhaps.

Kansas Wheat Commission CEO Justin Gilpin chuckled about a conversation that he had with wheat producers this week.

"One of the comments that we made was that, ‘yeah, I just got my combine out. And so, it's right on cue, it started raining,’" Gilpin told American Farmland Owner from his office at Kansas State University in Manhattan.

"He said that in hindsight, he should have pulled his combine out back in March and just left it sitting out there to see if that could have got it to rain,” Gilpin.

If only it were that simple.

Justin Gilpin Bio:

• Kansas Wheat Commission – Chief Executive Officer

• Heartland Plant Innovations – Chairman

• Kansas State University Department of Grain Science and Industry – Adjunct Instructor

• Wheat Quality Council – Board Member

• Kansas City Board of Trade Cash Basis Committee – Former Board Chair

• General Mills – Former wheat trader and wheat buyer

Drought Impact on Wheat

This year's hard red winter wheat crop is shaping up to be one of the smallest in 60 to 70 years. "It’s a very difficult year for the Southern Plains with hard red winter wheat," Gilpin said.

The disappointing finish is especially frustrating because the crop started with so much promise.

Winter wheat has a unique life cycle. It's planted in the fall, establishes itself before winter, then goes dormant until temperatures begin warming in late winter and early spring. That's when the plant wakes up and begins the critical process of producing heads and filling kernels.

Gilpin explained. "That's that critical time that it's going to start using moisture and developing kernels."

Farmers did their part.

Weather Hurts Wheat Harvest

"In the fall, we had really good planting conditions. Farmers got good stands, which sometimes can be half the battle," he said. "Going into the winter, crop prospects looked... there was a lot of optimism about what this crop was going to look like."

Then winter barely showed up.

"We had really warm days, didn't get much snow, didn't get much moisture of any kind," Gilpin said.

And when the crop needed rain the most, none arrived.

"The spigot just really shut off through that March and April," he said. "That crop was growing and using topsoil moisture, and then it just didn't have anything else to draw on."

The drought wasn't confined to Kansas. Gilpin pointed to western Nebraska as "ground zero" for the worst conditions. But the damage stretched across South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, and Texas — essentially the entire hard red winter wheat belt.

Low Wheat Harvest

The result will likely be historic. "It's going to be the lowest production since, like, the late 50s," Gilpin said.

Kansas has seen drought disasters before. The 2023 crop was painfully small, but 2026 may rival it.

"This year's going to be a historic, disastrous-type year when you look back on charts," he said.

Some producers won't harvest a crop at all. "There's going to be about 20% of the acres in Kansas that aren't going to be harvested," Gilpin said. "They're going to be abandoned because of the drought."

Late spring freezes added insult to injury, knocking out portions of fields that had somehow survived the dry conditions.

Ironically, the stress accelerated crop maturity. Combines began test-cutting wheat around May 22nd, roughly three weeks ahead of normal. But just as harvest was beginning, weather shifted again.

Wet Spring for Wheat Harvest

"We had to put about a two-week pause on it, as we just got high humidity and rain delays," Gilpin said.

The combines are rolling again now, but there simply won't be many bushels to collect. And that's where drought becomes more than a weather story.

It becomes a balance-sheet story. Input costs remain stubbornly high. Diesel isn't cheap. Equipment costs continue climbing. Fertilizer and seed bills haven't disappeared. Yet grain prices have moderated, leaving producers squeezed from both directions.

"Prices where they're at right now, somewhat moderated, and then to have a lack of bushels in combination with that, just makes for a really challenging time for our farmers," Gilpin said.

Stressful Time for Wheat Farmers

For operations already carrying tight margins, this season may expose just how thin their financial cushion has become.

"It's definitely a stressful time," Gilpin acknowledged. "As far as short-term liquidity and cash flows, that's definitely things that we're hearing being brought up more often than not."

That reality underscores the role of federal farm programs.

"If there's ever a year that highlights the importance of having a farm safety net, definitely this is the year," he said.

Gilpin noted that support payments don't simply help individual producers survive a bad crop year. The dollars ripple outward into small towns that depend on agriculture.

"They're helping keep operations afloat, but it doesn't just directly impact that farm," he said. "It has a direct impact on that local dealer, the cooperative, or that local community."

The hope now is that some good can come from the rain that arrived too late for wheat.

"Hopefully, our spring planted crops are going to benefit from some of this rain that's caused some harvest delays," Gilpin said. "We'll have some bushels to harvest this fall that'll help offset some of the losses that we're seeing on the summer harvest."

For wheat growers across the Plains, that's what farming often becomes…enduring one disappointing season while planting seeds for the next one, trusting that eventually the weather, and maybe even the combine superstition, will turn in their favor.